Mr. Hockey My Story (6 page)

I did odd jobs for as long as I can remember. When I was eight years old, I started delivering pamphlets for Livergant’s, a local grocery store. My area was about six square blocks. There were no
mailboxes on the street, so the pamphlet either slid through a slit in the front door or you knocked and handed it to someone in person. In the winter, I often chose the personal touch. When it’s thirty below, you hope a kind neighbor will invite you in to warm up. Delivering those flyers earned me thirty-five cents a day. Even as a kid I was big enough to handle the store’s bicycle, so in the summer I’d deliver groceries for Livergant’s. The sandy soil made for some tough riding, but I made better money doing that than I did with the pamphlets.

We also used to earn money by hunting gophers. Those who live in a city nowadays might think that sounds inhumane, but if you live in the country you know that gophers are no friend to farmers and ranchers. They eat crops and dig holes that can trip up a cow or a horse. As an animal lover, I don’t look back on my gopher-killing days with much joy, but it was a good way for a kid to earn some money. Much of the time we’d get them with homemade slingshots. We used to be paid one cent a tail. It might not sound like much, but every penny counted. We’d gather up our tails, sometimes more than a hundred, and walk to a spot about ten miles out of town to collect our money.

Sometimes we’d splurge with that money. Going to the movies cost a nickel and our gopher earnings would buy us popcorn and maybe candy as well. On some occasions we were less than honest about getting into the theater. One of us would buy a ticket, then head to the back door and sneak the rest of us inside. It seems unscrupulous in hindsight, but when you grow up in a family with nine kids and very little money to go around you learn how to cut some corners to get by.

Another way I earned money that didn’t seem like work at all was by fishing. I’ve loved to fish my whole life. When I was about
eleven I saved up my money and bought a fishing pole with a reel on it. Even then, I think I was a decent little fisherman. I’d catch ten or twenty fish a day and run them over to a Chinese restaurant in town. I’d bang on the back door and sell them for five or ten cents each. It was a good arrangement for both of us. Years later, after Colleen and I were married, we were visiting Saskatoon and she asked to see that restaurant. We drove over and went in and sat down. I felt like a kid again when I realized that the original owner was still there. He didn’t recognize me, though. That is, he knew me as Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings but he was stunned when I told him I was the little guy who used to sell him fish. I gave him a hard time and let him know he should have paid me more. He thought I was kidding, but I’m still not entirely sure if I was. We had a good laugh about it, though, and I was glad that Colleen and I got to share a small part of my childhood.

Anyone who marries a fisherman, like Colleen did, can tell you that sometimes it will be your privilege to hear a good fish story. She was lucky enough to listen to this one a few times. When I was just a kid, I once caught an eleven-pound pike when all I had was a little cane pole. I was fishing near a guy who spotted a pike in the water, pointed at it, and told me to throw in a line to see if I could catch it. My hook was baited with a piece of beef heart, so I cast it over and the pike hit it straightaway. I yanked the pole up, but the fish was so big it broke the rod. I grabbed at the string and, even though the line bit into my hands, managed to wrestle the pike in close enough to stab it with my knife. It was a hell of a fight for a little guy like me. I was so excited to land that fish I jumped on my bike and took it to show my dad at work. He brought it home, chopped it up, and that pike fed the family for a while.

Another job I enjoyed as a kid was caddying at the local golf course. I loved to golf and I loved being on a golf course. I still do, in fact. Even at twelve or thirteen years old I could get around a course fairly well. A lot of hockey players I know are naturals with a golf club in their hands. The mechanics of shooting a puck and swinging a golf club aren’t exactly the same, but they do have similarities. It helps to be good with your hands, for one thing. In both cases, the amount of lag you create as your hands pass through the contact zone helps to generate power.

I’ve been lucky in my life to be able to make money by fishing, golfing, and playing hockey. To be fair, I earned a bit more from hockey than the other two, but a paycheck is still a paycheck.

When I got older, the work I did became more physical, but that was partly by choice. I’d noticed that the best players on the ice always seemed to be the strongest guys, and that’s who I wanted to be. I was always preparing for the next hockey season and I tried to pick jobs that would help with that. Since I was big for my age, my father was usually able to put me to work doing something. Much of the time it was just moving heavy stuff from one pile to another. Dad did a lot of concrete work, which meant there were always cement bags to carry. My dad had the type of strength you get only by working with your hands for a lifetime. He used to lift things I wouldn’t even attempt. Watching him made me want to work harder. I would pick up bags of cement that weighed about ninety pounds apiece, one in each hand, and haul them to the mixer. The weight wasn’t the toughest thing to manage; it was the sacks themselves. They were packed so tightly there was no place to grip them. I would grit my teeth, clamp down on them, and pick them up. I figured the payoff for building up my hand strength would come when the season started. On top of that, Dad was always
bragging to the other guys about how much his kid could lift, so I never wanted to embarrass him by dropping a bag.

Working manual labor after school and on weekends became routine when I was about fourteen. I was big enough to do it and the pay was definitely appreciated. I could run a cement mixer, which earned a mechanic’s wage of around eighty cents an hour. Regular workers made fifty cents an hour. I kept my head down and worked hard to make sure the older men wouldn’t resent a young guy earning a higher wage. I remember that old cement mixer took forty-two shovels of gravel for every load. After filling the drum, you’d add powdered cement and then keep water running into it constantly as it mixed. Years later, I was watching television and saw
The Karate Kid
. In the movie the old sensei, Mr. Miyagi, trains his pupil using household chores. It occurred to me that waxing a car and painting a fence would have been a lot easier than carrying cement bags and shoveling gravel. In the end, though, I got stronger and the kid won the karate tournament, so I guess both approaches did the trick.

One guy my dad used to work with was named Frenchy. He lived nearby with his wife and kids. He was always good to me, so I went to Dad one day and asked if he’d switch my paycheck with Frenchy’s. I was making the extra wages as a mechanic and I knew the money would mean more to someone who had a whole family to feed. It was a small gesture, but it felt like the right thing to do. Frenchy ended up telling the other guys on the crew about it, which wasn’t the point, but it did smooth things out at work. After that the older men thought I was all right, which was fine by me. I kept on with the job, which was basically the equivalent of doing a daily weight-training program without even knowing it. By fifteen years old, I was six feet tall and around two hundred pounds. I was a big
kid, but I figured I’d end up huge if I kept growing. I leveled off right around there, so it didn’t turn out that way. I played my whole career at six feet tall and usually between 196 and 204 pounds, pretty much the same size I was as a teenager.

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F
or a young hockey player, getting on the ice with older players is always a thrill. My sons Mark and Marty did it when they were young, and so did I. Being among the better players on the ice isn’t always a good thing for young players. When you skate with full-grown men, it can be an eye-opener. The game changes. Everything is faster, so you have to do everything faster—skate, pass, think—to keep up. When you go back to playing with your own age group, the game slows down. When that happens for you in any sport, it’s a beautiful thing.

During the war, the senior club in Saskatoon would occasionally run a few players short, so they’d ask some younger guys to fill in. One night when I was around fourteen or so, we played in a town with a crowd that really hated the boys from Saskatoon. In the pre-television era, and even long after, senior hockey was the biggest game in town. And it was good hockey. Before the national hockey program began, it was the top senior club in the country that represented Canada internationally. Back then, the best senior team in Canada was arguably the best team in the world.

In any case, people took it very seriously, and when we started taking it to the home team that night, the fans turned on us. They were throwing things and spitting at us. When the home team realized that they couldn’t skate with us, they decided to show a little muscle. A fight led to a line brawl, and soon the benches cleared. Not wanting to be left out, some of the fans decided to join
in and hopped over the boards to mix it up. I’d never seen anything like it. One of the veterans on our team put me behind him and told me to watch his back. If anyone rushed up on us, he told me to smack them on the head with my stick.

I was pretty scared, so I listened to those instructions very carefully. The scene on the ice was crazy. I was trying to keep an eye on all of the fights around me when I saw someone coming up on us at a run. I knew what I was supposed to do, and I didn’t hesitate. I raised my stick and cracked him on the head. Down he went. As he crumpled on the ice, I looked down and noticed something I hadn’t a moment earlier: a yellow stripe on his pants. In Canada, that means only one thing. He wasn’t a player. He wasn’t a referee. He wasn’t even a fan. He was RCMP, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I had just clubbed a Mountie. I wish he had identified himself before charging at me. It would have saved me a lot of worrying, and him a lump on his head. My teammate grabbed me and we got out of there. I was sure they’d come after me for that and I’d land in jail, but days passed and thankfully no one knocked on our door.

I guess maybe that Mountie didn’t catch my number, so he didn’t know who to come find. In my hockey career I never had much trouble knowing who did right by me and who had earned some payback. I definitely took numbers. Another night that stands out for me growing up was a game we played against the Bentley brothers, Max and Doug. They were from Delisle, Saskatchewan, and three of the Bentley brothers were playing in the NHL that season. I was only about fourteen and it was one of those games where I could have skated forever. I was young and fresh and excited to be skating against big-time players. I had a ton of jump in my legs that night and I scored a few goals early. We had them down 4–0
and I was flying along the wing when suddenly Doug Bentley, who played for the Black Hawks, speared me in the belly. I doubled over onto the ice in agony. I was down there sucking wind when Max, who was about eight years older than me, looked down and said, “Slow down, damn you.” Part of me took it as a compliment. But only part. The next time I played against Doug was years later in the NHL. He was still with Chicago and I was with Detroit. Only this time, the shoe was on the other foot. He was coming down the wing, clearly having no recollection of the object lesson he’d delivered so many years ago in Saskatchewan, when I drilled him. Now it was my turn to offer some advice to a guy crumpled on the ice. I leaned over and said, “Slow down, damn you.” I figured we were even after that. I might have carried a grudge, but once a score was settled, I was willing to move on. Over the years, I ended up playing baseball with quite a few of the Bentley brothers. They were good guys and great athletes.

Around that same time, I got the chance to skate against another NHL player, Harry Watson. He was from Saskatoon and started in the league around 1940. When the war escalated, he interrupted his hockey career to join the Canadian military, ending up back in Saskatoon at the Royal Canadian Air Force Station. The base was a pretty big deal at that time, with pilots and air crews coming in from all over the Commonwealth to be trained by the British and Canadian militaries. When you fly into Saskatoon today, the airport is on the same spot as the old RCAF landing strip. While in the service, Watson kept up his hockey skills by playing for the squad run by the No. 4 Service Flying Training School. I played against them one night and after the game Watson sought me out to find out my name. I was flattered that he thought I played well enough to ask. About four years later
I was in my first season with the Red Wings when I found myself going up against none other than Harry Watson, who was playing left wing for Toronto. Early in the game I turned to chase a puck into the corner, and he was right on my shoulder. He could have put a big hit on me, but instead he slowed down and gave me a warning I never forgot, “Look out, Gordie!” It was a rough league back then, so that was pretty rare. After the play moved on I gave him a look, but didn’t say anything.

A period or two later we were heading into the corner again, only this time it was his head that was down. I can remember a good deed just as well as a liberty taken that needs retribution. “Look out, Mr. Watson!” I yelled. He slowed up and we froze the puck with our skates until the whistle blew. He looked over at me and said, “We’re gonna get along just fine.” We were both Saskatchewan boys, so that might have counted for something, or maybe he was just a class act, but for whatever reason, we extended that courtesy to each other for the rest of our careers. It goes without saying that you always play to win, but that doesn’t mean you need to scrape every inch out of every play, regardless of whether it puts another player at risk. When I watch sports these days, I don’t always see players respect their opponents the way they should. It’s a tough game, and I wouldn’t have gotten very far if I hadn’t been willing to lean on a guy from time to time. And sometimes you’re going to have to take a hit to make a play. But that doesn’t mean you waive your right to be treated with respect.